“Some have suggested that hoovering up the biggest IPs can only be a bad thing, but where in the past a win for one side in the ebb and flow of a console war is a loss for the other, things have typically swung the other way in time.”
TheEditor Y
Typical. You wait all that time for a record- breaking gaming industry acquisition to appear, then two come along at once
ou have to feel sorry for Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two. There he was on January 10th, clearing a space on his office wall to put up the Official GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ Record-Holder Certificate that was surely in the mail for the announced takeover of Zynga for $12.7 billion, then just a week later the record for the most expensive videogame acquisition was cruelly snatched away by Microsoft’s bombshell takeover of Activision Blizzard. The $68.7 billion acquisition elicited shock and awe from all corners of the industry, not least at the vast sums of money flying about. But the fallout has mostly taken the form of questions: What will it mean for Sony to not have Call of Duty in its arsenal at some indeterminate point in its future, and how might it respond with a headline acquisition of its own? For those in the PC camp, when (“if” seems moot at this point) will the Activision Blizzard catalogue be moved to Game Pass, and
Battle.net retired? Most pertinent of all (apart from becoming much, much richer) what fate will befall the embattled Bobby Kotick and his 30-year reign of terror given that one of his most prominent critics over recent months will inevitably become his boss?
The answer to all the above is that we’ll have to wait and see. The deal is being scrutinised and it could take more than a year before it’s approved and completed, by which time things could have changed again as another record-breaking deal emerges. Now that deals for gaming properties are in the same proverbial ballpark as those for multimedia entertainment franchises (Disney buying 21st Century Fox for $71.3bn and AT&T picking up Time Warner for $85.4bn, both in 2018), the sky has become the limit. Take-Two’s $12.7 billion for Zynga seems like chump change in comparison. The bigger question, perhaps, is what does Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard – less than a year after finalising its $7.5m deal for Betesda – mean for gaming and for gamers? Some have suggested that hoovering up the biggest IPs can only be a bad thing, but where in the past a win for one side in the ebb and flow of a console war is a loss for the other, things have typically swung the other way in time. However, the battleground of this generation is very different to the trench warfare of the past. The number of PS5s in circulation may be double that of the Xbox Series machines, but those 25m Game Pass subscribers – the majority of which must surely be PC gamers, more than make up the difference. That number can only increase as new CoD, Warcraft, Elder Scrolls and Fallout games are revealed. Whatever response Microsoft’s competitors muster, for better or worse, the Netflixification of gaming is well and truly underway. Meanwhile, as the vase of petunias is moved back to its original spot at Take-Two HQ: “Look on the bright side Mr. Zelnick, sir. At least they’ve stopped talking about the GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition.”
Richie Shoemaker
richie.shoemaker@
biz-media.co.uk February 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 05
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